You Get Used To It

The first time it happened was last year, actually. I may have posted it; perhaps it was shared on Instagram? But, here there is an interesting habit we’ve developed. Before you step out of the door, and by that I mean any door (we have three - a front door and two side back doors on either end of the second kitchen), you look down on the ground to make sure there are no snakes, scorpions, or other creatures or bugs resting where your foot will go! We’ve gotten used to it, to the point where we don’t really think of the action… we just do it. Sometimes it does hit me! “I could step on something that will sting, bite, or otherwise attack me! Wow! I’ve never lived in a place with this possibility before!”

In previous places we’ve had to watch when crossing the road. That one makes sense anywhere. In other places we got into the habit of looking at the sky to check for rain when leaving the house. That was Germany, where they have a saying: There is no bad weather, just bad clothing choices. In France we never really had any thought when leaving other than “Will they still have our favourite baguette at the boulangerie by the time I get there?” In Canada we might think about keeping an eye out for dogs whenever we went out. Back in China, from time to time, we’d have to be ready for an athletic rat who had climbed six floors and was waiting outside our door. That is why, if you had visited you would have noticed,, we kept a badminton racket by the door! One well-aimed whack and the rat would go falling down between the stairs a few floors down. But this is a different level! Scorpions!? Snakes?! Huntsmen spiders?! For a spell there we even had to look up for buzzing bees from a nearby HUGE branch-based beehive!

Another adjustment has been being back in Bible and Literature work. You may have heard me say that in some ways I was made for this as it requires hours of sitting, reading, hitting keyboard keys repetitively, looking for the one letter or word or jot or tiddle which is out of order. I love being in crowds, and enjoy being the life of the party, but I also love working alone with repetitive actions which challenge me to find and discern ways of how to make it quicker, better, faster, more complete. I don’t need video games because life IS the video game! Using software called Paratext, I sit at my desk for a few hours every morning going through the text, ensuring that every word is spelled correct. EVERY word. It’s a handy application, that’s for sure. I recall trying to do this in the word processor (Mellel, or Nisus Writer Pro), but it was complicated to keep track of each word, all of their instances, which verses, and then their conjugations! In Paratext, it’s all laid out in a nice table, and I just click word by word, check their spelling, a bit of grammar, some paragraph formatting, and click “CORRECT” if its spelled correct. Unfortunately I have come across a number of errors. It’s humbling. At one point, in the past, I told someone that it was quite likely there were no mistakes in the text. Yikes. I won’t get into whether these are mine, or from others, but the fact remains there are errors.

Paratext is set up in way that it can tell you when a project is complete. When I left the project in 2018 it was “complete” in that I had published the text. If no one ever touched it again, at least the people would have an NT and an OT, along with some handy study material and maps at the back of the OT. But, literature-ly speaking, the project wasn’t finished. There are a few factors that result in a project being finished, and ensuring every word is marked CORRECT is a major factor. This is what I’m working on now. The application tells me there are 58000 words to check. I’ve checked 16000! When I started my goal was 100 words a week. After a few months that goal increased to 100 words a day (meaning, 500 words a week since I “work” on weekdays). Now, the goal is 500 words per day, meaning 2500 words/week. (Like I mentioned, I really thrive on finding ways to exponentially better a process, it’s a gift I have.) By this measure, it will take about 17 weeks to finish. But, I’ve only hit this new goal for a few weeks now and have not consistently hit 500/day. Sometimes I need to spend more time shopping, cooking, house repair, cleaning, driving Michelle or Van around, meeting other people, not feeling well, etc., so the average has been 1600 words/week, which still works out to 26 weeks. This is about 6 and half months, so by April I “should” be finished. I can tell you now though that is unlikely due to holidays, family time, and just… life. So lets say June, or, by the end of the school year. HOWEVER, I realized just last night that finishing this massive step is impossible by next June 2026. Why?

Paratext only lists the number of unique words. 58000 or so for this project. What it doesn’t show is how many actual words need to be checked. So, a word like (insert long word here) appears ONCE. But a word like “men” appears 8689 times. That means, to do this job well, I need to check each of those men’s … that’s 8689 instances*. I’ve already taken a year to get to 16000 single-instance words! I dug into the numbers and discovered why a finish date of June 2026 is impossible. THERE ARE 501263 INDIVIDUAL WORDS TO CHECK. Half a million. Half of one million words! There are ways to speed things up, as it were. One way is that some of these words can be approved as CORRECT by a cursory glance. A detailed reading of its context is not necessary. So, for many words which appear twice, or 6 times, or 48 times, or 211 times, it shouldn’t take too long to read through the list and just know they are spelled CORRECT. I mean, a word appearing at least 8 times or more is almost guaranteed to have been spelled correct.

One reason a word like MEN requires special attention is that it is both a first person pronoun, and it is a suffix! With my book - кітабыммен. Sometimes I’ve come across words missing their suffix, or the suffix has been detached somehow. Even though it is tempting to say, “Surely 8000+ instances of MEN MUST be correct”, there is a chance that there are some loose suffixes in there. Are a few mistakes worth saving time over? Who will ever notice these possible errors? Well, if the example of Jesus’ tells us anything, it tells us that God takes time to do the necessary thing well and complete. How can I do less?

How long will it take, then? Well, the answer is bound by an important time factor: Our son’s graduation. He will finish high school May 2027. That then is my boundary - finish by April 2027 (that last month will be full of graduation celebrations, and preparations to return to Canada). That gives me an ”extra” year past the initial estimation. I haven’t looked into the averages I need to pull off to make it happen…. But I believe I can do it!

Scorpions, bibles, and project projections. What a life!